Like Abraham Lincoln’s announcement of “a new birth of freedom” in the Gettysburg Address, the American literature covered in English 378 struggles to articulate, then problematize, American freedom in the era surrounding the Civil War and emancipation. What is freedom? To whom does it extend? What are its blessings and its costs? Nobody has ever thought more profoundly about these issues than the American writers who emerged before, during, and after the war America fought with itself: Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Harriet Jacobs, Emily Dickinson, Mark Twain, Henry James, Charles Chesnutt, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and others. Prerequisite: One course in English with attribute GFWI.